Building Online Communities
Community has been an essential buzzword in the prospectuses for all the recent Internet IPOs. This is not an accident or hype - it is a reflection of the fact that even the most modest online products need to build up a community of players in order to survive and succeed. Communities, in this context, are non-geographical groupings of Internet users who have common interests and who use the Internet to further those common interests. In this context games have a particularly powerful resonance in building communities, because by definition the players have a shared interest in the game. Where the intensity of the shared interest is low - for instance an ISP trying to be a portal - then the shared interests tend to sink to the lowest common denominator. This is why most chat room systems tend to be hotbeds of sex-driven conversation. Intensive policing of this sort of system merely breaks it up as people with little identification with the service seek more congenial surroundings. If the intensity of shared interest is high then the possibility exists to build up a stable community with individuals who take an interest in the development of their community. Such people are prepared to take some responsibility for that development, and you get a consensus about what is and what isn't acceptable behaviour in that community.
With 'boxed' games (i.e. ones sold off the shelf in stores) the financial imperative is different to online games for a number of reasons. Publishers usually expect to get all their money back - and their profit -within three months, and then the game disappears from the shelves and there are no more sales. One advantage of this model is that once the customer has bought the game the vendor has the cash in their hand and it then doesn't make any difference whether the customer plays the game for 20 minutes, 20 days, or 20 weeks. In addition there is little brand loyalty in the boxed games business - people don't say 'when is the next EA game due out?'. This means that selling a duff game will probably not have that much effect on subsequent games sold by the company. Companies in the online games business do not have this luxury. Most online games have to give a free trial period - anything from 2 hours to 4 weeks, depending on the type of product - and try to convert the guest to a customer in that period. Since the actual payment made by a customer at any one time is going to be relatively small it is absolutely vital to have a base of customers who want to come back for more. With the explosive growth of the Web over the last few years it has been possible to ignore this underlying truth, because of the number of new people coming online. However, this will not last forever, and the problem of churn will hit online games as soon as Web growth slows significantly. I would argue that the single most important way for games - or other online services for that matter - to build up repeat usage is to build communities.
You cannot please everyone! The rules you apply to your game will need to be optimised for the community you wish to build. The parameters of online communities are more varied than people realise. The two most obvious determinants are age and nationality. Most online games seem to have opted to go for the US teenage market, which has plenty of disposable income. This has its own management problems caused by the high levels of hormones involved! But there are plenty of other markets that can be identified as places to build your core community - families, women, children and minority groups are only the most obvious. All these have their own problems, and you must set out to provide a suitable framework for building the target type of community in your game.
The axes of community building problems lie along the two interlinked lines of age and culture. It used to be a lot easier. Usually the overwhelming majority of the players came from one country, and age was differentiated by when the customer was online. The younger people were online earlier, older people later. As the Internet expands to take off in more countries, though, the lines start to blur. The predicted take off of the European market and levelling off of the US market in the next few years will only reinforce this blurring. The simple fact that customers are scattered across many different time zones means that children and adults are no longer automatically separated. This expansion also means that you are going to get an entirely new potential for cross-cultural conflict in online communities. What are acceptable topics for discussion to a European may well not be acceptable for an American. At the moment the lack of penetration in the non-US market minimises this, because outside the US only more educated people who are more likely to be relatively culturally tolerant are on line. Managing this sort of cultural conflict is likely to become one of the major problems facing online community based services in the next few years.
So is all doom and gloom? No, I don't think so. It is a matter of understanding what sort of business you are in, and planning to deal with the problems that will arise. The key problem is that most people don't understand the business we are in. They think that online games are about computers and therefore they only look at the technical problems of producing an online game. They are wrong - badly wrong. Online games are about managing people. By comparison, writing the code for an online game is peanuts (designing an online game is a different matter, but that is outside the scope of this talk). What this serves to underline, though, is the fact that your management tools have to be build into the design of the game from the very start. You can't just bolt them on to the code as an afterthought when your management staff start screaming blue murder and resigning in droves. You have to set down the rules for your community, they have to be clear and as unambiguous as possible. You have to make it clear what the consequences of stepping outside the rules are, and you have to give your staff the tools they need to enforce those rules. Even more, though, you have to have rules that cope with irrational and completely anti-social players as well as the normal players. It takes time to build up a community where people feel comfortable and are prepared to keep coming back. It only takes one unchecked rogue player a couple of days to destroy that feeling of comfort and in short order destroy the entire community. At the end of the day, you have to be prepared to say, 'I don't care how much you pay, we don't want you as a customer.' This is very difficult to do, but you have to be seen to be protecting the community that is using your product if you want to retain that community.
Online services, especially games, need to build up communities with shared interests whose members feel comfortable using the service. Once the product is running and its core community has been identified, all the online resources should be bent to building, sustaining and protecting this community. Without such a community the product will have to rely on advertising bringing in 'passing trade' and one-off purchases, which while they may sustain the service for a while are inherently unstable. This instability will soon result in customers deserting the product for the 'next big thing', making consistent sustained usage very difficult.
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